The Making of a Man

by James W. Lee

II.

The time was when men accepted the existence of a moral order with the same implicit, unquestioned confidence, that all men to-day accept the existence of a natural order. In Homer’s Themistes we have an illustration of this confidence. The very word by which the decision of a judge is described attributes it to Themis, the invisible embodiment of justice. Thus the judge is but the channel through which the decision passes from the unseen moral order into the Greek court of justice. The judge is not respected because he has authority to make the decision, but because his vocation makes him the vehicle through which the decision of a higher power is rendered. Moses said to the people of Israel, “Thou shalt not lie,” “Thou shalt not steal,” “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” but these were not his words simply, but the words through which a moral order was interpreted. The solemn and awful import given to these commands did not arise from the vehicle through which they passed into the Hebrew social order, but from the fact that they inhered in the very constitution of man as a social being, and when they were uttered, they were felt to come from the God who fashioned man’s life and set him in communities and states. They had the same sort of authority in the moral realm that the declarations of Newton, concerning the power of gravity, had in the natural. Newton did not conceive in his own brain the laws of gravity, he saw them and formulated them. Nor did Moses create the Ten Commandments, he saw them and interpreted them. The laws of gravity were transcripts from the will of God concerning matter, the Ten Commandments were transcripts from the will of God concerning men. When natural bodies come together, it would be found that they always attracted each other in proportion to their mass and inversely as the squares of their distance. When men come together, it would always be found, that if they were to live together in harmony and health; if they were to advance and get above the planes of the brutes and the savages; they must abstain from lying, and stealing, and adultery, and thus be truthful, and honest, and virtuous.

The laws of gravity were not arbitrary rules, ordained to oppress suns and systems without rhyme or reason. Order of some sort had to be preserved among the millions of blazing, rolling worlds. Nor were the Ten Commandments arbitrary lines of conduct imposed upon men at the pleasure of a great, omnipotent tyrant. Men could not live apart, out of touch and contact with one another. Thus living, they were lower than the beasts that perish. They could not live together without rules of some sort to regulate their lives. And laws which looked to the preservation of truthfulness, honesty, and virtue, were thought better than laws which looked to the production of lying, dishonesty, and adultery.

Because of the impetus given to the studies of material science within recent years, by the discoveries of scholars, the attention of men has been directed to the objects of the natural world and the laws which regulate them. Discoveries into the nature of heat, light, etc., has had the same effect upon the human mind that the discoveries of the gold fields in the West had upon the people of America in the early days. People abandoned fields and shops and stores and went in search for gold. The attention of the civilized world has in this generation been directed to the consideration of outward facts. There has been promise here of earthly fortune. Conviction as to the existence of a moral order with its rewards and penalties is not so deep and abiding as it once was among English speaking people. But it is well to remember that the moral laws of the universe have not in the meantime been suspended, because men have not seen proper to consider them and to act with reference to them. They are just as real and as unfailing as ever. When accepted and followed, their presence is seen in health, in political stability, in intellectual progress. When ignored and forgotten, their presence is seen in disease, in political corruption, in mental stupidity, in sham and emptiness. In one way or another they always manage to get in their work. They never sleep, they never tire, they are eternally present to bless or to curse, to lift up or to cast down. They get round to every man’s home, and sooner or later to every man’s life, bearing honor or dishonor, legitimate reward or righteous infamy. They are not to be bribed, whitewashed, or bulldozed; they come clean, unvarnished, and unveneered to posit their labels on every man’s character; and whatever is read on the label, absolutely defines the content. Irrespective of money, titles, place, or rank, they come. The president in his seat, the judge on his bench, the preacher in his pulpit, cannot escape. If the president gets labeled pigmy, pigmy he is. If the judge gets classified fraud, fraud he is. If the preacher gets down as trimmer and sham, trimmer and sham he is.

III.

How are we to find moral laws? Just as we find natural laws. When we find the truth of natural bodies, reason sees the laws which inhere in them, and prudence dictates such action on our part as these laws require. When we come to truth, on the moral plane, or to such knowledge of the facts as corresponds to the truth, reason, unless perverted, sees the laws that reside in them, and conscience dictates that these laws should be obeyed. Conscience unerringly and infallibly approves the right. By the aid of the light which is thrown upon it when the intellect comes into relations of knowledge with moral truth, it recognizes the laws the will ought to follow. These laws make up a part of the truth. Before the right can be recognized, the truth must be seen. When that which the intelligence takes for truth is not the truth, the conscience will recognize laws for the will to follow that do not correspond to the laws of God. It has often happened that what the intelligence took for truth did not correspond to objective reality, and hence was not the truth; hence the conscience has often approved and suggested lines of action that were at variance with that which was essentially and eternally right. Those who followed the dictates of conscience, however, under such conditions, did, under the circumstances, right. To have refused to follow conscience would have increased their confusion. A man in the bog, with the certainty of death before him, ought to follow the guide that appears, even though he should not know how to lead him out of the swamp. Conscience never fails to come as near recognizing the right as the intellect comes to discovering the truth. When that which the intellect apprehends as truth corresponds to objective reality, we may be sure that the laws which inhere in it, and which conscience suggests as the ones the will ought to follow, correspond to the laws of God. One’s conscience may lead him wrong, but only when the intellect has led him wrong. St. Paul’s conscience led him wrong when it impelled him to persecute the Christians of the early church, but it was because that which he held for truth did not tally with the outward facts, and hence was not the truth. Had the supposed truth which he held while persecuting the Christians been real truth, then in persecuting the Christians he would have done right. The reversal of conscience resulted from the incoming of new truth, or such knowledge as was sustained by the outward facts. The conscience of the Hindoo mother that leads her to throw her child into the River Ganges is as good as the conscience of the Christian mother that leads her to carry her child to the Sunday school. The trouble with the Hindoo mother is not with her conscience, but with her religious knowledge; it does not correspond to the facts of the order of the moral and spiritual universe. We are to determine the value of the affirmations of conscience by determining the value of the knowledge out of which those affirmations grow. Knowledge is valuable in proportion to its correspondence with that which is real. As often as the intellect grasps the truth, the conscience will suggest the right that accompanies it. There is no truth of a moral nature that has not its attendant right.

IV.

We know the moral truth as we know material truth, through its relations. Relation makes the difference between chaos and cosmos. To define any natural object is to place it in its relations. We could not define oxygen without naming the elements to which it is related. To take it out of relation is to take from it any meaning. Error is wrong relation. When the mind assigns a place to an object other than that which really belongs to it, in the order of which it forms a part, we call this error. If, seeing the parts of a house scattered over a field by a storm, we should confound a sleeper with a rafter, we should take it from its proper place and take away its meaning as a part of the building. All of our knowledge is of relations and not of sensations, as Hume taught. Sensations set the mind to classifying and comparing, and the knowledge it comes to is of relations. Take the sensations the mind has when a red object is presented to the eye. Does not the mind begin at once to distinguish this sensation as one of redness from other sensations that are of different colors?

Is not its reality as a particular color constituted for us by its relation to colors, by its place in the scale of colors? If there was but one color, and that color the one we now know as red, how could we know it as such? How could we call it red unless to distinguish it from some other color with which we, for the time being, compared it or contrasted it? So true is it that reality is constituted for us by the sum of its relations, that if the relations of things are maintained, no increase or diminution of the quantity of things related will be detected in our knowledge of them. If the earth were compressed into a sphere no larger than a marble, no one could know it if the relations among the objects which make it up were the same.

Again, the earth might be enlarged until it should be a billion times larger than what it is; yet this could not be known as long as men and gates and spoons and saucers and houses and cuff-buttons were enlarged in the same proportion. The leaf of a man’s dining table might be ten miles square, and the ball of butter on his table as big as the Stone Mountain in Georgia; yet if cook, and cat, and stove, and water-bucket were increased in the same ratio, he would not recognize any difference.